drinking your own champagne
What It Means
When a company's employees actively use their own AI products and services in their daily work, just like customers would. This means AI teams don't just build and deploy systems - they rely on them for actual business tasks to experience firsthand what works and what doesn't.
Why Chief AI Officers Care
It's one of the most effective ways to catch AI performance issues, bias problems, and user experience gaps before customers encounter them. Companies that don't dogfood their AI often miss critical flaws that only surface during real-world usage, leading to customer complaints, regulatory scrutiny, and competitive disadvantages.
Real-World Example
Microsoft's AI teams use their own Copilot tools for writing code, creating presentations, and managing projects in their daily work, which helped them identify and fix issues with the AI's accuracy and response times before the broader enterprise rollout.
Common Confusion
People often think this just means internal testing, but dogfooding goes beyond QA - it requires employees to genuinely depend on the AI system for their actual work, not just run test scenarios.
Industry-Specific Applications
See how this term applies to healthcare, finance, manufacturing, government, tech, and insurance.
Healthcare: In healthcare AI, "drinking your own champagne" means clinical staff and administrators actively use the AI diagnostic t...
Finance: In finance, drinking your own champagne means using internally-developed AI tools for critical functions like risk asses...
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Includes:
- 6 industry-specific applications
- Relevant regulations by sector
- Real compliance scenarios
- Implementation guidance
Technical Definitions
NISTNational Institute of Standards and Technology
"The practice in which tech workers use their own product consistently to see how well it works and where improvements can be made."Source: kelley_dogfooding_2022
Related Terms
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